The German Genius

landmass. Other than that, however, it is not easy to compare the experiences of the émigrés in the two countries. Daniel Snowman, who interviewed many of the more prominent German émigrés who settled in Britain, found that they were characterized by two qualities: they had been raised in homes that were “steeped in music,” learned from their mothers, and in which Bildung, emanating from their fathers, was taken very seriously. * 2
    The country they arrived in was not especially interested in German culture. Most educated Britons directed their attentions to France and, to an extent, Italy. Christopher Isherwood, who spent time in Berlin and Hamburg in the 1930s, said he was attacked by his friends who deplored his interest in Germany “and wished that I went more often to France…the France of Proust and the French Impressionists.” German art and culture had been anathema since the First World War, though before it the likes of the composers Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and Donald Tovey (1875–1940), had felt the need to receive recognition in Germany before Britain.
    As with those émigrés who arrived in America early, so there were some who arrived in Britain in the early 1930s. Carl Ebert and Rudolf Bing were among the first, the former the Intendant at the theater in Darmstadt (who resigned after an ignominious meeting with Göring), the latter the manager of the Charlottenburg Opera in Berlin. They would collaborate in helping the Glyndebourne Opera get off the ground and, in 1947, Bing went on to found the Edinburgh Festival, though he “hardly knew where Scotland was.” 3 Walter Gropius was another early arrival; he had visited Britain in 1934 for an exhibition of his work at the Royal Institute of British Architects and was invited back later in the year when he began a number of collaborations, notably Impington College north of Cambridge. Rudolf Laban’s Labanschule in Stuttgart transferred first to Paris, in 1937, and then on to Dartington in Devon, where the arts community of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst was making waves, and where Laban’s former pupil, the choreographer Kurt Jooss (see below), was already ensconced. 4 Alexander Korda, Hungarian by birth but German-speaking and Berlin-trained, had left the German capital in 1926, destined for Hollywood, where he failed to thrive, and so had turned up in London where his fortunes were transformed, and he became one of the most successful film producers of all time. Another Germanophile Hungarian émigré, Emeric Pressburger, who had worked alongside—if not actually with —Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Carl Meyer (creator of Caligari ), was forced to leave in the spring of 1933. In England, Korda introduced him to an aspirant director Michael Powell, and an enduring partnership was born. Ernst Gombrich, the future art historian, left Vienna for Britain in 1935, joining painters such as Oskar Kokoschka and Kurt Schwitters.
    Britain had not been overwhelmed with immigrants. During the first year of the Hitler regime, about 2,000 refugees arrived, rather less than those who chose France (21,000), Poland (8,000), and Palestine (10,000). But, as the 1930s darkened, Britain—with the United States—became the preferred destination, the more so when, in 1938, the British agreed to accept “shiploads” of minors from Germany-Austria. Daniel Snowman says that the Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), as it was known, began in December 1938 and continued until the outbreak of war the following September, during which time 10,000 young people, three-quarters of them Jewish, found sanctuary in the United Kingdom.
    For academics, the Academic Assistance Council was set up (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), the brainchild of Leo Szilard, William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics, and Lionel Robbins, a colleague there. This organization, which found rooms above the Royal Society in Burlington Gardens, helped people such as Karl Mannheim, Max Born, Hans Krebs, and Rudolf Peierls. 5 By 1992, no fewer than seventy-four refugees, or children of refugees, had become Fellows of the Royal Society and a further thirty-four were Fellows of the British Academy. Sixteen had won Nobel Prizes and eighteen had been knighted. 6
    The Jewish refugees tended not to settle in the traditional East End areas of London—instead a new synagogue was established in Swiss Cottage (the Belsize Square Synagogue). Many